The Dream Palace

A few weeks ago, the Chelsea Hotel acquired a new owner: Ed Scheetz, the C.E.O. of King & Grove, a luxury-hotel company. The other day, Scheetz took a tour of the hotel, which closed to guests two years ago, in the company of Sherill Tippins, the author of “Inside the Dream Palace,” a book about the Chelsea that will be published in December. “I think that activating the building again is what is really exciting to me,” Scheetz said, as he stood in what was formerly the residents’ private rooftop garden, which he intends to turn into an outdoor lounge space.

Scheetz—who had been a minority partner with the hotel’s previous owner, the developer Joseph Chetrit, until he bought Chetrit out—said that he had never been on the Chelsea’s roof in the hotel’s earlier incarnations. “I wasn’t hip enough,” he said. His vision for the hotel, he explained, is to open the place up to New Yorkers who, merely because they were not friends with Patti Smith or Bob Dylan or William Burroughs, had never had access to it. “Unless you were visiting a resident, or staying here as a hotel guest, no one in the New York community at large has ever experienced the Chelsea,” Scheetz said.

Other ideas Scheetz has for activating the building: a shopping gallery and a bar in the basement; an artists-in-residency program; and small bedrooms, hyperbolically designated as “artists’ lofts”—priced at two hundred dollars a night, Scheetz’s idea of a budget destination—next door to rooms that will cost a thousand. “We want a community that is diverse—socioeconomically, age, everything,” he said. “We want young people that don’t have a lot of money to be able to experience it, and interact with somebody who may have the greatest suite in the hotel.” Scheetz is planning to install an upscale restaurant on the ground floor, to which he hopes the Chelsea art world will bring its business. (Such a venue will not displace El Quijote, adjacent to the hotel’s lobby, which has been in operation since the nineteen-thirties; the hotel’s former manager and part owner, Stanley Bard, signed a long lease with the restaurant a few years before his departure, in 2007.)

Tippins regarded Scheetz with slightly skeptical interest. Her book chronicles the utopian vision of the building’s architect, Philip Hubert, who established the Chelsea Association, a housing coöperative for adventurous souls, and who built an edifice that encouraged class commingling. Hubert was inspired by social conditions not unlike those at the end of the Bloomberg era, Tippins had explained over coffee at El Quijote before meeting up with Scheetz. “The context is unbelievably similar, because they had just been through almost exactly what we have just been through,” she said. “There had been a government-business alliance that stole so much money from the people, and overspeculation as a result, and the recession, and so much wealth shifting to the wealthy. There were middle-class people desperate to stay in town, and not being able to. And the Chelsea was a tool to solve that problem in one building: to make a model village.”

Scheetz said that he intended to honor the Chelsea’s history in the renovations of the interior. “You want the feeling that it’s a little bit worn—like you came in and fixed it up, not that you rebuilt it,” he said. “It’s all about layering over the ages.” Such layering will be pastiche: the exposed electrical wiring and water pipes in the hotel’s corridors before it closed will not be preserved, and previous renovations have largely erased the Chelsea’s earliest layers. “Where it exists is in people’s apartments, which is why it is so cool to see them,” Scheetz said. He recently came to a settlement with the Tenants’ Association, which had been suing his former partner for the hardship of living in a construction site. Scheetz said that there would always be a residential component to the building, even if current residents—there are about a hundred of them—move or die. “Though I haven’t noticed any mortality yet,” he joked. “It’s a magic building. I’m going to live here myself.”

Tippins, who first crossed the threshold of the Chelsea in the nineteen-seventies to attend parties at the home of Jakov Lind, the writer, seemed philosophical about the prospect of the Chelsea’s undergoing another transformation. “It is interesting to see that it has now been bought by exactly the kind of developer that Bloomberg has encouraged so much in our recent past,” she said, as she walked along Twenty-third Street. “It is almost as though the Chelsea itself has said it’s time for a change. You do get that feeling about the building after a while. I feel like as the Chelsea goes, so goes the city.” ♦